WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY
Developing Your Planning Skills
Planning Skills
Developing planning skills provides a strong foundation for success and growth —academically and professionally.
With well-developed planning skills, you can stay organized, focused, and proactive in your approach to work. You can tackle complex projects, manage deadlines, and overcome challenges efficiently.
In this guide, we explore planning skills and how you can develop them to position yourself as a valuable asset in any organization.
What Are Planning Skills?
Planning means organizing and arranging activities and resources efficiently to achieve desired goals. Planning skills refer to your ability to create a strategy to guide the accomplishment of a specific objective.
Effective planning is vital in your career and personal life because it ensures productivity and proper use of resources. It also helps you avoid anxiety by meeting deadlines. With solid planning skills, you can work in different industries since you learn to anticipate challenges and take proactive measures to tackle them..
Why Are Planning Skills Important?
Planning skills are crucial for all professionals to be successful. Whether you’re a top decision-maker or part of a team, having strong planning skills can help in the following ways:
- Goal achievement: You and your organization will be able to establish clear objectives and create strategies to reach them. With a detailed plan, you can prioritize tasks, allocate resources, and measure progress toward your goals.
- Efficiency and productivity: You can identify the most efficient steps to complete a task or project without wasting time and resources.
- Adaptability: Having strong planning skills allows you to have room for flexibility and adjustments when devising strategies. It prepares you for unexpected situations, ensuring goals can still be pursued even with changes in circumstances.
- Resource allocation: When planning a project or task, you can determine the resources needed to complete it. Examples of resources are time, finances, and personnel.
- Risk management: When creating a plan, you must assess potential risks and develop strategies to address them. Solid planning skills will help you avoid potential disruptions that could hinder the success of your project.
What Are the Benefits of Having Planning Skills?
Strong planning skills can positively improve your life and increase your chances of career success because they demonstrates professionalism, reliability, and a commitment to organizational success.
Let’s explore how planning skills can benefit your professional life:
- Improved focus: You can prioritize tasks, set deadlines, and remain focused on meeting your goals. You can break down large goals into smaller, actionable steps to help you track your progress and stay on course.
- Goal attainment: When setting your academic and career goals, you can create a clear plan and identify the resources and actions required to reach your desired milestones.
- Time management: Effective planning allows you to allocate time wisely and set realistic deadlines to help you make the most of your available time. This can help you avoid procrastination, improve productivity, and reduce stress levels.
- Decision-making: By weighing different options and making informed decisions, you can consider multiple potential outcomes, leading to better decision-making.
- Career advancement: Individuals with strong planning skills are often seen as dependable, organized, and proactive. These traits will make you a valuable candidate for career advancement and opportunities.
Examples of Planning Skills in the Workplace
Planning skills can help you reach your full potential in your career. Let’s look at some practical examples of planning skills in the workplace:
Goal Setting
This provides a sense of direction for an organization. It helps all teams align their individual efforts with overall organizational objectives. For example, if your firm sets a goal to increase its market share by 20% within the next two years, it will need:
- The marketing department to start a new campaign geared toward promoting your products and services.
- The customer care team to improve customer satisfaction to help realize your company’s goal.
- The sales team to acquire 50 new clients within the next year.
Setting goals in this manner ensures that everyone in the organization is working toward a common objective and improves the likelihood of success.
Task Prioritization
This refers to determining the order in which tasks should be addressed based on their importance and urgency. Suppose your organization is facing multiple projects that need to be completed within a given time frame. In that case, you must effectively prioritize tasks by assessing their potential impact on organizational success.
For instance, you can decide to enhance customer support before launching a new product. This way, when orders and queries start coming in, you can address them without any hiccups.
Sequencing and Scheduling
These tasks are closely related to task prioritization. They involve determining the order and timing of activities to optimize efficiency, resource allocation, and timely completion.
For example, some tasks may rely on the completion of others. If you’re a team leader, you must determine the order in which tasks need to be executed, estimate the duration for each task, and schedule them effectively to optimize time and resource utilization.
Change Management Planning
Change management planning means effectively managing and implementing changes within an organization. It involves anticipating and addressing the impacts of change on employees, processes, and systems to minimize resistance and ensure successful adoption.
For example, if your organization is restructuring, the decision-makers must first identify the need for change. You must then develop a change management team to support and communicate with the employees to ensure a smooth transition.
Evaluation and Review
This planning skill involves assessing the effectiveness of the implemented plans to identify areas of improvement. For example, you can establish evaluation criteria such as timely project completion within budget. You can then identify lessons learned and extract insights to inform future projects.
How Can I Use Planning Skills?
As a professional, you can utilize planning skills in various roles and industries.
Ways you can utilize these skills in the business world include:
- Setting realistic timelines: As a project manager, you can develop strategies for project execution and managing expectations of deadlines and timelines.
- Allocating resources: In business settings, you will be expected to plan ahead for workforce needs and talent acquisition to ensure resource needs are met.
- Effective delivery of healthcare service: Planning skills help you implement patient care protocols to provide quality healthcare services while meeting regulatory requirements and financial targets. Roles such as a healthcare administrator require planning skills to ensure the effective delivery of healthcare services. You can plan for staffing needs, budget allocation, and facility utilization.
How Can I Learn Planning Skills?
WGU offers various degree programs to enhance your planning skills and prepare you for a successful career. Here are a few examples of our degree programs that have coursework dedicated to developing your planning skills:
- The School of Business offers a Master of Business Administration (MBA). With this business-focused degree, you’ll be able to evaluate results to determine if a plan achieved the identified goals as well as design activities and events to achieve a particular goal.
- In the Leavitt School of Health, you can enroll in a Master of Science in Nursing, where you'll be able to assess plans for efficiency and effectiveness in achieving a particular goal.
- The College of IT offers a Master of Science in Information Technology Management. With an IT-related degree program, you’ll be able to create project plans to track goal completion.
- In the School of Education, you can learn planning skills in several programs. With an education degree, you’ll be equipped to create an instructional plan to help learners overcome misconceptions or errors in understanding.
Frequently Asked Questions
Planning skills are important in the workplace because they help organizations set clear objectives, ensuring everyone is aligned and working towards a common purpose. They also enable efficient resource allocation, helping organizations achieve success.
Effective planning incorporates the following key elements:
- Clearly defined goals that are relevant and achievable.
- Optimization of resources such as people, time, and finances
- Determining realistic timelines and milestones to track progress.
- Consideration of potential challenges and the development of contingency plans.
- Continuous monitoring and adjustment of the plan as needed.
To improve your planning skills, consider the following tips:
- Break down complex projects into small manageable tasks and set a timeline for completion.
- Anticipate potential risks and develop backup plans.
- Learn from past experiences and create plans based on lessons learned.
Planning skills provide direction, allowing you to prioritize tasks and allocate your time effectively. They also enable efficient use of resources, ensuring you allocate time, energy, and attention to the most important tasks.
